Boston's Symphony Hall is celebrated as one of the finest concert halls in the world. It is generally less well known that Boston also has the smaller and equally fine Jordan Hall, located in the New England Conservatory. A fixture of Boston's musical life, Jordan Hall is also literally the heart of the Conservatory, being the venue not only of visiting celebrity solo and chamber music recitals, but of a multitude of the whole range of the Conservatory's student concert activity.

There's no doubt that Masterprize, the international composition competition with a mission ‘to bring music lovers and composers closer together’, is a slick and professional operation, with a tremendous outreach. The CD with the six pieces which made it to the final (of some 1,000 entries) was stuck on the front of both Gramophone and Classic FM magazines, with a joint print-run of around 100,000. The ‘gala final’ in the Barbican on 30 October, when the London Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Daniel Harding, was broadcast live on Classic FM (which reaches 6.5 million listeners a week), NPR in the States (16 million) and Radio Latvia (you tell me); and NPR also packaged it for their deferred ‘Symphony Cast’. These are scarcely believable figures for contemporary classical music: Masterprize is plainly doing an enormous amount of good. Another statistic worth celebrating is that 1,300 children were involved in the associated education project, playing the six works up and down the UK. It's just a pity that most of the music that made it through to the final was so dull, a post-Hollywood syrup of feel-good consonance and glittering over-orchestration – slickly wrapped empty boxes.

The world première of Robin Holloway's String Quartet, given by the Endellion Quartet at the RNCM on 13 October 2003, came in the midst of a number of concerts around the country marking the composer's 60th birthday. (Let us not forget, too, Claridge Press's publication of Holloway's writings, also coinciding with this anniversary.) Clever programming between Haydn's quartet op. 76 no. 4 and Brahms's op. 51 no. 2, enabled one to appreciate Holloway's first essay in this genre in the context (on the one hand) of a composer for whom the string quartet was seemingly an effortless medium, and (on the other) of a composer on whom the quartet tradition weighed heavily. For Holloway too, the string quartet proved problematic, and almost unassailable – his highly biographical programme-note revealed an initial inability to engage with ‘this most hallowed of the classic media, with its incomparably rich literature’. This inhibition threatened to stifle work altogether, for it was only a final attempt in August 2003, after three ‘sterile years’ of trying, that Holloway found a way through the problems the string quartet posed him.

Many of Justin Connolly's works have been premièred and recorded by Nicholas Hodges, whose musicianship provided the inspiration for Connolly's Piano Concerto (2001–2003). The form and character of the piece are influenced by the ancient idea of the labyrinth, the forces of soloist and orchestra being well suited to the roles of Theseus and the Minotaur, where one protagonist signifies the existence of the other and the distinction between hero and villain is not always apparent. The orchestral forces employed are unexceptional. Brass and percussion are divided into two separate groups to the left and right of the conductor, whilst the first horn player sits apart from his colleagues and is mirrored by a fourth, offstage, horn player.

At least one institution of Germany's contemporary music scene looks likely to survive the government's current austerity schemes: Munich's Musica Viva series. The second concert of its 2003–4 season, held in Hercules Hall on 7 November, remained true to the great tradition of this venerable series by treating a packed auditorium to two world premières and the first German performance of a ‘modern classic’. Presiding at the rostrum with the Bavarian RSO was Musica Viva's current director Udo Zimmermann, himself a composer of note and an open-minded champion of the pan-European avantgarde. In a talk broadcast in the interval, Zimmermann emphasized the series' new alignment on co-operative ventures with other state broadcasting companies, specifically in France and the Baltic countries. Besides allowing radio orchestras to pool their straitened resources, this tactic also has the highly desirable advantage of giving further hearings to new works after their premières. The size and attentiveness of Zimmermann's audiences suggest that he has found the right tack to steer Musica Viva out of its doldrums of previous decades and through the cost-slashings of the new millennium.

In a project that will be completed in 2007, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has been commissioned by the Naxos recording company to write ten string quartets. Large-scale ambitions already realized, the intimacy of chamber music offers an opportunity not only to consolidate but also to probe and quest with the precision of scaled-down forces. It is timely, then, to be reminded that, although it has not been a major preoccupation such as opera, concerto and symphony writing, the quartet form has drawn from him some significant examples evincing an original approach. A recent Metier release usefully gathers together on one disc all Max's works for string quartet prior to the Naxos series. In these persuasive recordings, the members of the Kreutzer Quartet display a keen understanding of the individual character of each piece, the circumstances of its creation and the purpose for which it was intended.

The idea of commissioning modern preludes to preface well established pillars of the classical repertoire has apparently been done a few years ago with soft new sounds gracing the air as audiences picnicked as a lead up to performances of Mozart's operas at Glyndebourne. Conversely one hears of The Departure of the Queen of Sheba, and other novelties. However, when conductor George Vass, musical director of the Presteigne Festival, commissioned three modern preludes to Handel's Messiah, to celebrate his tenth anniversary at the festival (2002), this must qualify as a ‘first’, and his brainchild. The Presteigne Festival is well known for its commitment to contemporary classical music. This was an ideal opportunity to commission three major British composers, to make their own 21st century ‘commentaries’ on Messiah, using the same instrumental forces available to Handel. As he also directs St Albans Choral Society, they put on the Messiah 25 October 2003, at St Albans Cathedral, prefaced by the three new preludes in the presence of two of the composers, Cecilia McDowall and David Matthews, using Orchestra Nova from the Presteigne Festival.

Film music, often considered a ‘Cinderella’ art-form, is really more of a ‘Sleeping Beauty’: to a ‘first approximation’, its entire history exists on films which we are never shown. Prefatory to the 2003 Musicians Benevolent Fund Royal Concert on 4 November, however, the Barbican cinema presented an early-evening resuscitation of no fewer than four long-dormant items connected in some way with Vaughan Williams, two of whose orchestral works were programmed to follow.

For a composer to be able to have a fiftieth birthday concert of his own music is an achievement, but to have those works performed with dedication and enthusiasm by a host of different choirs, ensembles and soloists, including many children, students, as well as colleagues, and enjoyed by a capacity crowd, is an even greater tribute. Malcolm Singer's 50th Birthday Concert on 13 October 2003 was just such an occasion, featuring as it did a world première and second performance, in a programme that spanned from an early graduation work to recent choral and instrumental commissions. What emerged was a stylistic thread and aesthetic integrity, a predilection for quasi-minimalist processes, energetic rhythmic polyphony, and a keen sense of expressive shape that gives Singer a unique place in the pantheon of postmodernism. Above all the works radiated a practical expertise that derives from Singer's experience as an all-round musician. Currently Director of Music at the Yehudi Menuhin School, Surrey, he is an accomplished conductor and teacher who has produced a large oeuvre in almost every genre, including children's music.

Murray McLachlan's première of Erik Chisholm's Sonata in A minor on 4 January marked the centenary of Chisholm's birth (in Cathcart, outside Glasgow) to the day itself. Chisholm was a considerable force for good while he was busy in Scotland: the first British performances of Les Troyens, Béatrice et Bénédicte and Idomeneo; visits to his ‘Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music’ in Glasgow from Bartók, Casella, Schmitt, Sorabji (a close friend), Szymanowski and other luminaries. But he could, apparently, be a difficult man, and with his posting to Singapore by ENSA in 1943, to conduct the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and subsequent nomination to the chair of the music department of the University of Cape Town in 1946, his native land seems to have been content to forget the outsized personality whom Arnold Bax called ‘the most progressive composer that Scotland has produced’.

Philippe Hersant (b. 1948 in Rome, graduated Paris Conservatoire, studied with André Jolivet), has been working with the French national radio station France-Musique since 1973 and has received many honours as composer in France. In February 2004 Radio France presented a ‘retrospective’ of his prolific output as well as the première of his Violin Concerto, a Radio France commission. His new opera, Le Maine Noir, based on Anton Chekov's story, will be premièred in May 2005.

Latvian Independence Day, 18 November (commemorating the day 85 years ago when Latvia proclaimed its independence from Russia), was marked in London by a mini-concert in the Royal Academy of Music: a handful of Romantic songs by Emils Dārziņş, delivered in the rich bass voice of Pauls Putninş, and the first UK performance of Pēteris Vasks's Piano Quartet, composed in 2000.

I am grateful to Stewart R. Craggs for his kind comments (‘Letters to the Editor’, Tempo 227), and happy to say that I wholeheartedly endorse his other observations – to the extent, in fact, that I hope I may be permitted to amplify one of them.